Game Details

Every time I boot up Just Cause 3, there are a few minutes of absolute brilliance. An average in-game journey might begin by catapulting via grappling hook into a perfect backflip before soaring into the atmosphere on an indestructible parachute. Properly alternating between grappling hook, parachute, and wingsuit keeps my momentum going. Before I realise it, I've reached my target: a red and silver depot filled with papier-mâché gas tanks and fascists.

Just as I un-sling the ironically indiscriminate grenade launcher at my side, the game stalls. I groan because this has happened before, and it will happen over and over before I’m done with the game.

Weapons of interactive destruction

Just Cause 3 on the PC is a fireball, digitally and metaphorically. In the third entry in the series, pseudo-protagonist Rico Rodriguez has returned to the land where he was raised. His mission: to indiscriminately lay waste to its state-run infrastructure by means that, while maybe not strictly necessary, are certainly many and varied.

The fictional, Mediterranean-feeling island republic of Medici is under the thumb of one General Sebastiano Di Ravello. The man is a psychopath and a dictator, but he happens to be sitting on the world's only supply of Bavarium—the game’s Unobtainium stand-in. That makes him best friends with the West—specifically the CIA, which employs Rico and would love to get easier access to the explosive/limitless energy source/magic space rock.

Most of this geopolitical wrapping is torn aside by the time Rodriguez surfs into the country on top of a cargo plane. With a rocket launcher. Before jumping into the ocean.

Just Cause 3 matches the frenetic, destructive gameplay tone of Just Cause 2, though the story is a bit sillier this time around. Just Cause 3 isn't totally devoid of pathos, though. There are some surprisingly thoughtful moments here and there—particularly where "The Agency's" exploitation of Medici's rebel natives are concerned. But the plot is so simple, and told at such a broken and breakneck pace, that I rarely had time to care about any of it in between annihilating radar dishes and hitchhiking on the underside of attack helicopters.

The open world comes together

After a lengthy load, Just Cause 3 usually starts just fine.

Staying airborne is usually a good idea.

Just Cause is great about letting you combine different actions, like grappling onto a moving vehicle while flying through the air.

Side activities are pretty rote but useful.

Better fix those technical problems before you land...

Seeking and destroying specific objects is the only way to claim territory.

Rico's grappling hook has many uses.

While you are fairly resilient, the enemy can overwhelm you if you stand still.

Winching down structures is a convenient and often necessary method of destruction.

Everything but Rico is rather fragile.

This is just one of the smaller sections of Medici that you'll need to take down.

Just Cause 3, on the other hand, presents a big jumble of fully controllable systems that, when used in the proper order, make wonderful things happen. Medici is still a physics sandbox, as my time spent in ditches pinned beneath burning ATVs can attest. But that's balanced out by all the times I boosted an exploding jeep off of a cliff, only to bail out into a parachute and “THWIP!” myself onto a passing aircraft (which I usually proceeded to crash into a guard post, liberating more of the island by happy accident).

Even as the game somehow makes these daring feats of acrobatics a trifle to pull off, you can always come away feeling that you deserve full credit for the execution. The game doesn’t just show you cool stuff your character can do; it lets you take control of that cool stuff.

Like most open-world games, all of these mechanics are in service of the overarching goal of wresting control from the bad guys, one district at a time. In this case, that means destroying very specific (sometimes irritatingly specific) utilities while getting shot at.

Rico secures the ability to fly, use an infinite supply of guns, and detonate remote bombs about 15 minutes after his one-man D-Day. That means there’s little in the way of new destructive capabilities to be gained through additional play.

Instead, most of the unlockable extras are more like quality-of-life enhancements: upgrades like airbrakes for your wing suit or nitrous oxide for your primitive land-based transportation. Here, Just Cause 3 actually makes the bog-standard ring races, car chases, and other predictable open-world padding useful; the better you perform in each category of activities, the more upgrades you unlock.

The usual open-world minutiae isn't just an excuse to experiment with each of the tools at your disposal. It’s also a means of accruing more such tools. It's a wonderfully satisfying system.

When it works, that is.

Then it all falls apart

That crucial “when it works” caveat doesn’t refer to all the times Rico eats gravel (or tank shells) thanks to improper application of the winch on his fabulous, double-sided grappling hook. Our vaguely heroic leading man is pretty resilient, which is a godsend given how sweltering the GTA-style heat level can get. If Rico keeps moving, he can easily keep ahead of even an entire squadron of military foes. If not... well, Medici may need a new one-man infiltration force.

No, I'm actually referring to the incredible number of hitches, malfunctions, and plain old bugs I toiled against while reviewing Just Cause 3. Running on a computer nearly identical to the developer's recommended specs as listed on Steam (the only exceptions being a GTX 770 rather than a GTX 780 graphics card) Just Cause 3 was an unqualified fireball at multiple resolutions and combinations of graphical settings.

Even with everything set to low quality and every special effect turned off, the frame rate could drop from slick as gun oil to jagged as shrapnel at the drop of a grenade, often even without the explosions. These performance hits seem just as likely to happen in the middle of a blazing firefight as while soaring over an exquisite horizon. There were flashes where the performance would rise to “acceptable,” but the hitching was nearly perpetual.

It feels great to land a 150-mile wingsuit joyride or to winch a tank off a cliff at 40 paces. It’s easy to forget those moments of transcendence, though, when you’ve screwed up twice as many attempts while fighting a stuttering frame rate.

An interruption to carnage

If the performance issues were limited to just the frame rate, I might have been more willing write it off as a game that's just too outrageous for my mortal PC (minimum/recommended specs notwithstanding). But there were so many more technical problems during my time with the game. A few lowlights:

Regular freezing for between 1-2 minutes when pausing, un-pausing, completing a mission, or especially when exiting the game

Frequent instances of audio desyncing from the video

Controls that stop working after switching out of the game and back

The entire ocean disappearing—twice

Random disconnects from Square Enix's servers

That last bullet point is particularly important, since it seems unlikely to be fixed unless Square changes its entire online system. Just Cause 3 is solely a single-player game, but it establishes an automatic connection to Square’s Uplay-style servers as soon as you start the game (unless your computer is entirely offline). That connection lets the game surface up-to-date leaderboards for little factoids as you play; things like the like farthest jump in a car or the longest time spent without touching the ground.

It's a cute incentive to get you using delightful systems you might not have otherwise considered. I certainly went out of my way to stay airborne more than a few times whenever another player's time taunted my own by blinking to life mid-parachute ride.

In the last few days, though, this “service” has changed Just Cause 3 from practically unplayable to completely so. If the automatic connection to the game’s servers is severed—which in my last few pre-release days with the game has happened every few minutes—you'll need to wait another minute or two while the game tries to reconnect. When that process inevitably fails, you’re finally able to opt for the sweet mercy of an offline mode.

That relief is short-lived, though, as "offline mode" only lasts until you pause the game, check your map, or browse those all-important upgrades. At that point, the game stalls out to attempt to reconnect yet again, obviating the whole point of being in an “offline mode” in the first place.

Connection lost...

It’s extremely disappointing that a review of a game that can be so joyful when it’s working has to read like a simple bug report. But I can only report on the game I was given to review, and right now, just a day before the game is available for download to the public, that game is often unplayably broken in a number of ways (on the PC version at least; we weren’t given console versions to try before release).

Several other reviewers I’ve talked to have reported similar "hiccups" in their play. Still, the problems don’t seem to apply to everyone; livestreams and other video of the game running perfectly smooth have been free from embargo for several days now.